Screening Tools for Sarcopenia
Hiroki Nishikawa, Akira Asai, Shinya Fukunishi, Toshihisa Takeuchi, Masahiro Goto, Takeshi Ogura, Shirô Nakamura, Kazuki Kakimoto, Takako Miyazaki, Shuhei Nishiguchi, Kazuhide Higuchi
Abstract
The elderly people are characterized by multiple comorbidities, dementia, and are at risk of developing sarcopenia and frailty. Sarcopenia is defined by loss of muscle mass and muscle strength or physical decline. Sarcopenia is a main component of physical frailty. Screening tools for sarcopenia that can be easily determined in daily practice are useful and include the SARC-F screening tool. SARC-F is a questionnaire consisting of five questions: Strength (S), Assistance walking (A), Rising from a chair (R), Climbing stairs (C), and Falls (F) on a scale of 0 to 2. The recommended cutoff value is ≥4 points. The SARC-F has been shown to correlate well with clinical outcomes in the elderly and various underlying diseases, while it is also true that the SARC-F has its shortcomings such as low sensitivity for sarcopenia. In this review, we mainly outline the SARC-F and mention other screening tools for sarcopenia.